She caught one brief glimpse of vast fields of slag and rubble around the mouth of the shaft, before the lander began to drop down into limitless darkness. Faraway lights, mounted on the sides of the shaft, illuminated what looked like abandoned cities or factories clinging to the walls.

She left the two drones on guard near the surface. They wouldn’t be able to hold off a full-frontal assault for long, but at least she would have some warning if the Emissaries were about to follow her in.

The lander dropped down farther, while the mouth of the cache seemed to grow smaller and smaller, increasingly far overhead.

Trader, I’m not going to let you get away with the artefact. Do you hear me?

Silence.

Either something had happened to him, or he wasn’t interested in talking.

Trader? Are you there?

It had all been going so well until he had tried to activate the Mos Hadroch.

Trader had placed it in the mouth of the drive-forge, and then accessed the command structure he had retrieved from the Greater Magellanic Cloud so very, very long ago, activating it through a meshlike apparatus woven around two of his secondary manipulators.

The effect had been spectacular.

During his initial experiments, using Whitecloud as his proxy, it had become rapidly clear the artefact was much further beyond his understanding than he had anticipated. Aspects of its operation pointed to a powerful, almost godlike intelligence buried somewhere within its depths.

At first, the device had appeared to unravel, its outer shell peeling open to reveal internal components that defied comprehension. Its shape had mutated rapidly, expanding well beyond the drive-forge, and Trader had felt the presence of that overwhelming intelligence, for the first time, as it ransacked his yacht’s onboard systems and even, to his shock, his own mind.

He had turned to flee, recognizing that events were already spinning far out of his control. But it was far too late: the artefact had already expanded to surround him, its malevolent intent suddenly and startlingly clear.

Chapter Thirty-seven

The lander kept following the signal from Trader’s ship, until it dropped down on to a shelf extending out from a darkened side passage no different from the thousands of others she had seen during her long descent. The onboard systems told Dakota there was a protective field placed over the mouth of the passageway that retained a breathable atmosphere.

She exited her craft quickly, a torch in hand, and soon spotted Trader’s yacht resting nearby in the gloom, on a bed of shaped fields. Most of its drive-spines were either broken or melted or both. She flicked the torch on, then bounded forward in long, loping strides due to the minimal gravity, manoeuvring her way past cluttered wreckage and abandoned machinery.